Search Strategies

Always think about different ways to say the same thing. Start with keywords to describe your topic, within results, read the abstract and look at the subject headings to identify additional keywords to use and revise the search (if needed).
Retrieve too many results? Limit to scholarly articles, limit words to subject

Search Strategies:
Start with keywords (place phrases in quotes), use connectors (or / and) and look for the subject headings specific to each database.

place phrases in quotes

"foreign policy"

"human rights"

"transnational security"

"middle east"

"political participation"

"border security"

"voting rights"

"nuclear weapons"

use * for truncation

environment* = environment or environments or environmental

intervention* = intervention or interventions

risk* = risk or risks

immigra* = immigrant or immigrants or immigration

threat* = threat or threats

terroris* = terrorist or terrorists or terrorism

use - or - to connect synonyms

"middle east" or "arab state" or yemen or egypt
globalization or multinational
"social media" or twitter or facebook
policy or policies

use - and - to connect concepts

("world hunger" or "global hunger") and gmo*
("counter terrorism" or counterterrorism) and ("social media" or twitter or facebook)
"foreign policy" and china
immigra* and (policy or policies or legislation)

additional concepts

law and legislation

policy or policies

government policy

specific countries

In addition, you can search by a known author.

Many databases also allow for proximity searching.

Information for the Ebscohost databases:

You can use a proximity search to search for two or more words that occur within a specified number of words (or fewer) of each other in the databases. Proximity searching is used with a Keyword or Boolean search.

The proximity operators are composed of a letter (N or W) and a number (to specify the number of words). The proximity operator is placed between the words that are to be searched, as follows:

Near Operator (N) - N5 finds the words if they are within five words of one another regardless of the order in which they appear.

For example, type tax N5 reform to find results that would match tax reform as well as reform of income tax.

Within Operator (W) - In the following example, W8 finds the words if they are within eight words of one another and in the order in which you entered them.

For example, type tax W8 reform to find results that would match tax reform but would not match reform of income tax.

In addition, multiple terms can be used on either side of the operator. See the following examples: